Harold Ockenga

==Early life and education==
Ockenga was born on June 6, 1905, and raised in [[Chicago]] as the only son of Angie and Herman Ockenga. Ockenga's father had German ancestry; the name Ockenga is [[East Frisia]]n. Harold Ockenga was baptized at Austin Presbyterian Church, and his mother later brought him to Olivet Methodist Episcopal Church of which he became a member at age eleven. As a teenager, he had a strong sense of God calling him to pastoral ministry. He began his undergraduate education at [[Taylor University]], a then-Methodist institution in [[Indiana]].

After graduating from Taylor in 1927, Ockenga enrolled as a student at [[Princeton Theological Seminary]] but did not complete his theological studies there. In the midst of the "[[fundamentalist-modernist controversy]]" facing Christianity in the 1920s, he and many conservative classmates followed those members of the faculty – such as [[J. Gresham Machen]], [[Robert Dick Wilson]] and [[Cornelius Van Til]] – who withdrew from Princeton to establish the [[Westminster Theological Seminary]] in [[Philadelphia]] in 1929.

Ockenga graduated from Westminster in 1930, after which he enrolled as a student in philosophy at the [[University of Pittsburgh]] to research on Marxism.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism|last=Marsden|first=George|publisher=William B. Eerdmans|year=1987|location=Grand Rapids, MI}}</ref> He was awarded the PhD degree in 1939. During his studies at Pittsburgh he met Audrey Williamson, had a whirlwind courtship, and married in 1935.